


Grotesque

by Runespoor



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Bruce's Issues Are Legion, Gen, Gotham eats her children, Scary Bat God
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-27
Updated: 2012-08-27
Packaged: 2017-11-13 00:24:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/497331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runespoor/pseuds/Runespoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Alfred compromised with the thing inside Bruce’s soul, from Gotham’s point of view. Alternatively: This is how to co-opt a soul.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grotesque

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [B is for Bruce](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/11111) by Marcelo. 



> Inspired by [this ficlet](http://marcelo.dreamwidth.org/147094.html?#cutid1) by and _The Lesson_. NOMNOMNOMNOMNOM.

She sees, of course. The man next to the boy, and the woman further away who dares breach closer yet. 

The woman reaches out and brings her arms around the boy, and Gotham bristles. She is gratified to see that the boy doesn’t lean into the embrace. He stands straight and stiff like another of her stony statues until the woman releases him, and when the woman passes a hand on his cheek he turns his face away. 

When the sun goes down, the woman leaves. Gotham is with her when she leaves, and she’s where the woman is going, and always she remains with the boy, all at the same time. 

Gotham is in a thousand places refracted in a million minds. She’s with the gang members shooting across the street as Dr Thompkins returns to Crime Alley, she’s with the young lady giving the cop his cut before returning to her business, she’s with the nods and smiles accompanying Leslie back into her clinic. 

When Leslie gets inside Gotham is with her too, with the emergencies and the deaths and the almost-miracles she will pull out, and the part of her Dr Thompkins inhabits purrs at her return, and the part of her blood-entrenched into stately Wayne Manor atop the hills of Bristol wants her to never return. May Dr Thompkins reign in her castle.

In the manor, the woman is an annoyance enough, but far more dangerous is the man, for far more devious are his acts. The woman, it must not be forgotten, leaves, and out there Leslie Thompkins does far more good that she does evil here. 

The man is as constant a presence by the boy’s side as it is possible for a human to be.

*  
He can’t be in the boy’s dreams.

*

_Gunshot, blood, corpses fall, and the spring-clear rain of pearls on the asphalt._

_In the dream the moment gets stretched and stretched until it starts going backward and over again. (Never over.)_

In the dream within the dream the boy wakes up, trembling, and finds a woman with her face in shadows sitting on his bed.

“Mom?”

“Shhh,” Gotham says, and she opens up her arms toward him, and reaches out.

He melts, face hidden against her shoulder, and she murmurs of all the great, crazy, terrible things he will meet, recycling stories that happened before and painting him in it. After a moment the boy gasps, shoulders jerking like broken bones and jerking away from her.

He wakes up with cooling water on his cheeks.

She is reminded of the rain dripping down cold walls, rivulets on windows, and the frozen gargoyles gloomily looking over the city, up so high as to be nearly unseen from the streets. Gotham has little use for monuments, but she likes gargoyles. 

*

The man wants to be here for Bruce. She goes, _don’t_. 

She isn’t sure yet what to do about him. He doesn’t have a name – yet. There are no gleaming pearls about him, no smoking gun. He is the tick-tocking of a grandfather’s clock. He is a presence where she’s trying to build isolation; he is an absence where Dr Thompkins can at least spark spears of fierce longing; he is, Gotham concludes, the opposite of what she’s trying to achieve.

But he isn’t, she realises, her enemy.

When fever throws the boy in deluded nightmares, he watches over the boy, and it is both more and less than what Gotham or Leslie, doctor friend of the boy’s doctor father, could do. Jar of cold water on the nightstand, and careful hands as he draws the blankets closer to the shivering body.

He tries to turn on the light, but the boy’s whimper stops him.

“Don’t,” he says, a clarity-starved mumble. His eyes are bright with unshed fever, the deep flatness made more pointed by the vulnerability of his sickness.

The man’s hand stills on the lamp’s switch. “Master Bruce?”

“M’eyes hurt,” the boy explains in a thick voice.

“Of course,” the man says, and he turns the light down until it is a mere glimmer in the room, and the boy relaxes, peaceful.

Gotham is floating. She’s in the room, while her boy turns against the devils of sleep and the man watches by his bedside, lines drawn on his face like the rain gouges the facades of ancient buildings, in the shadows the soft nightlight lovingly avoids. She’s with Sheila and her broken wrist, and Arthur as he hides his school report deeper under his mattress. 

The man doesn’t reach out. Only watches, like that’s all he can do.

*

The gargoyles, according to the fast-gone city guides tourists buy to follow her language, and forget in their hotel room on the morning they disappear, are called her guardians. High above the streets, people like the thought of the gargoyles, old stone and history. The tourists who come and go and are only real for a couple of weeks, take photographs and make delighted noises, trying to pick out their favourite.

They are less fond of the sentient gargoyles Gotham populates her streets with, her flesh and blood children she’s as fond of as her steel and stone ones.

It’s a mistake to call the stone figures her guardians. She isn’t something that can be guarded. She’s with the dream powder they push through their veins, and with the stale smell of the room where blue agents lock their wealth – and unlock to exchange back one of the pieces against much-needed dirty money. She’s waiting by the Greyhound station for the tires to screech to a stop, and her new mixed-up people to stumble out, and waiting by the bridges for the next body to drop. She’s in the snort kids don’t muffle when their art teacher shows English waterpaints, and in the ragged newspapers strewn on the ground that wind washes down the sewers.

Of all her flesh gargoyles, her favourite may be the boy. He’s beneath the manorhouse now, beyond her usual sprawl, but there he goes, and where he goes she is. He’s leaping from stone to stone, jagged bowels, and speaking to shadows, and Gotham is there. (Meanwhile she’s in the subway’s underground tunnels, darkness torn by glaring lights, rats nibbling on the toes of forgotten people.)

_Bruce_ , she calls out to him, surrounds him with echoes of her self, and he doesn’t flinch.

When someone upstairs – upon whom Gotham can only see the invisible chains of money and those less shakeable still of habit anchoring their ghostly emptiness to her – commits an off-colour joke about her boy, the man runs them through with an icy stare. They become as nothing to his level presence; the space they occupy an incident in the geography of the room, the words they utter of less consequence than a breeze through the curtains.

He never recoils before the off-putting strangeness her little boy sometimes exudes.

*

“Maybe we ought to find you proper teachers,” he offers carefully after Bruce breaks a glass case, two curios, and incidentally, dislocates his shoulder.

Gotham – like the restlessness in Bruce’s eyes – stills.

Possibilities innumerable like branches in a labyrinth play out before her, like the lives of her people, simultaneous and contradictory. They flicker mirror-like on the shards of glass, and all of them are dark, and all of them reflect in the boy’s eyes.

_Everything that we dreamt that you never could_ , Gotham breathes, and the gunshots in Park Row resound like the final drums of faraway heartbeats.

_Everything._

Of the night, and the dark, and the glint of metal and the stickiness of tears. Everything fast and unmoving, of the violence of screaming fights, of motors purring and of the tender coil of shadows. Of lonely disasters and the sweet intoxication of drowning in her nights. Of being there while not, and knowing where to be by watching what is there.

Slowly her boy turns his gaze out, and up at his stern-faced servant.

“Yes. Thank you, Alfred,” Bruce says.

*

She’s with Bruce when the man carries trays of news or food, and signals the end of a slice of time, allotted differently for each activity. She is used to the notion from families over her ground, but some words commonly used never cross his lips. 

_Play_ is not a word found in this house out of the leather-bound volumes, imprinted with nostalgia, that Alfred dusts while thinking of skulls. _Game_ is nothing if not the way Bruce picks up relentless all challenges and the dreams in his nights, urban hunting.

_Trick_ is more common. Of the light; sleight of hand. Familiar from the card shuffles on her corners, if not from the sort that are turned in the dark.

Bruce and his servant build a mansion made out of confidence. Eyes that want to see ghosts, hearts that learn only the inside of human minds, and lies like the politicians vying for her attention, of better tomorrows. Alfred is no less adept a conman as Bruce is shaping up to be.

*

She’s with Alfred in the late night manor when he raises to the dark-framed portrait of Thomas and Martha Wayne – bright with the half-flames of spirits and spells – a gaze made heavy by sleepless regrets. Alfred has no encouraging words, but encourage Bruce on his path he does, and he doesn’t reach out and it is good that he’s always there.

Looking for guidance is looking at the past, and on the oil painting Martha is wearing pearls ( _gunshots_ , Gotham conjures almost wistfully), looking for forgiveness is looking at what shall never be again.

(In his lonely room Bruce is sleeping through the nightmares that no longer wake him up, and his dream a shadow-masked lady is stroking his hair and whispers loving threats.)

She’s with Alfred when he wonders, _Am I doing the right thing_.

_So you are, liegeman_ , Gotham answers.

She’s with him when he brews his nightly tea, coiled around him as though she had always been there, as though she had sculpted him out of one of her own rocks.

*

Gotham has no uses for monuments, for they erode and crumble away and are too grand to bother with, but the artfulness of this disaster is as a monument of its own, and the lines on Alfred’s face, the lines on her other gargoyles.


End file.
